#goldendichotomy

alec’s house is a lot nicer than her tiny apartment. he keeps inviting her back here. that’s good, because she would panic if he had to see her apartment. it’s made for her and no one else -  the boxes of film, the bottles of chemicals to develop film in her approximation of the c-41 development procedure, the plastic tubs and the scattered plants that keep dying on her and the mugs from when she can’t bring herself to clean but can bring herself to make tea and the empty plastic water bottles from when she can’t even bring herself to do that much. and it isn’t that alec’s film is less messy or cluttered.

it’s just that there’s a difference between a sort of homey clutter, which is what surrounds her now, and the kind of desperate inability to function that pours through in everything she does. florence hasn’t done anything how people should since she was young. over time that strangeness has gotten stronger and stronger but she’s also gotten better at hiding it. now she can project certain things to the outside world. she’s just anxious, not terrified. she just likes films. she doesn’t obsess over it, of the idea of framing everything she can.

and sometimes she thinks alec sees through it. the persona of who florence devall is, something that is both authentic but watered down because it was that or die. in the privacy of her own apartment she can think all the things she sometimes toys with during the day. okay, her brain supplies. it feels like a weight in the back of her skull. okay but what if and hear me out, i promise this isn’t as bad as it sounds, but what if you don’t think you deserve it? like there’s choosing but what if you just –

florence stares down at her mug of tea, catching bits and pieces of what might be a reflection in the dark surface. “you know, back when i was still going to college in boston,” she finally says, and maybe that says enough, still going and boston lifting the statement up, holding implications in their meager syllables, “i had a really bad time. things were bad. i was pretty bad. like i’m not great or anything now but things were worse. i was in a dorm and i couldn’t… like, leave? i know, i know, depression or whatever, but it wasn’t just that. i was keyed up in all the wrong places. or something. it’s hard to describe.”

she could describe it maybe as an image, as a color (the greyish-brown that everything seemed to be, beige and inoffensive but also nothing) or a sound (air conditioning running forever with the same quality, somehow, as static) but not as a word or a sentence or even a book. her sense of self sometimes fails her, here more than anywhere.

she picks at her nails. nervous. “sorry. i don’t know why i needed to tell you all that. the, uh, point is, right, that i guess that’s really brave. to choose that. because i was not choosing that for a while and it was easy to just like, lay there and not choose that? but also not choose anything else. it’s like you’re the caregiver for someone who isn’t there any more except the someone is your life and you’re just watching their chest move up and down but the person isn’t there any more. and i can say from experience that it’s really hard to bring yourself back from that. so you’re a good person. i guess, or good at being a person.”

“hey,” florence says, “come on. that doesn’t sound like you.” it is with the tone of someone who has considered being mean, but perhaps the last incident was several years ago. she isn’t really a mean person. she is mostly just quiet, and out of the way. she would prefer to never be looked at, and it’s why she feels incredibly odd standing next to alec. what do you wear to a gallery? she freaked out about it this morning and spent forty minutes digging through her closet, eventually digging up an old green sweater and black dress pants. 

it was sort of weird, for alec to invite her to the gallery. she had mentioned liking art once but had pointed out that hill city didn’t exactly have a lot of galleries. it’s weirder to look at a friend’s work. when she had gone to galleries in boston, it had been works by people she had never met. she could think whatever she wanted, without any consequences, even if she would only voice the positive things out of fear of being overheard.

doesn’t change the fact that the painting looks a little off. it’s off-center. someone didn’t hang it right, or evenly, or something. 

she tilts her head to follow the line of it. “it’s not that bad,” she tries. “i kind of like it tilted. it’s, um. endearing, i guess?” doesn’t change the fact that the canvas is soaked in gold and red and black and white, a messy arrangement that is both geometric and fluid. she doesn’t like it. well. no. it makes her uncomfortable, but sometimes art does that. it just feels bloody, somehow, which doesn’t feel like alec at all. sure, he’s stick-thin and sometimes looks sickly, but he doesn’t look like this, which is violence, and red, and she just can’t put it together. is this what the inside of his head looks like? if hers is nothing but arranged frames, making herself smaller and smaller and smaller in each successive shot, a slow zoom out, then is this what he sees in his mind’s eye?

“you like gold,” she finally says after a moment. “i don’t know why that surprises me, but it does. i guess it’s just not the color i expected you to go for.” when she thinks of alec, she thinks of green like her sweater, a dark deep green, or rich deep browns, or something wholesome and deep, a color you could drown in. or she thinks just of something mottled between the two, a combination and blend of rich deep colors.